This, then, was our ledge, a stage whose most dramatic moments up to that point were when Ken and I washed the picture windows.
The first customer for the parakeet seed was Houdunit — or his brother, sister, cousin, aunt — followed a few minutes later by a small, energetic brownish bird with striped underparts. It was promptly joined by another bird of the same size, shape and behavior but with a red breast and face. In spite of the difference in coloration they were obviously a pair. From their quick discovery of the food and their unhesitating descent on it, it also seemed obvious that they were a part of the neighborhood, a bright, lively, tuneful part. Yet I had never seen or heard them before. They might as well have been silent creatures of the darkest night. How could I have missed them?
This theme is a recurrent one among new bird watchers. To the uneducated eye, as to the incurious mind, much of the world is in darkness, and a thousand songs are lost on the unlistening ear.
That afternoon, for the first time in years, I went to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. It is a charming place, a cluster of tile-roofed buildings with inner courts and stone archways and long open-air corridors rambling in all directions. A sycamore-lined creek runs through the area, which is shaded by massive old live oaks and dotted with huge boulders brought down by the creek during winter floods.
When our daughter, Linda, was in grade school, we used to take her and her friends to the museum on afternoons too hot to hike and too cold to swim in the sea. The children especially liked Bird Hall. They’d stand staring up at the condor and the white pelican suspended from the ceiling, or into the display cases which held the smaller birds, captives long past caring. The children’s comments made it clear that they considered the stuffed specimens to be more like toys than real birds who had once walked on lawns or touched treetops or skimmed the surface of the sea. For them then, as for me now, the robin in Bird Hall has little connection with the fat, spectacled comic who appoints himself boss of the berry patch. The scrap of grey in the glass cage bears only a token resemblance to the bustling little busybody we call the bushtit, and the sight of the acorn woodpecker wired to a plaster post sets up no echo in my ears of the marvelously raucous and kinetic dialogue he conducts with his friends.
Movement is the very essence of a bird. The museum of the future should, and probably will, occupy itself less with collecting specimens and more with obtaining good color films and sound tracks of creatures alive, moving and meaningful.
In Bird Hall I found drab replicas of the birds I’d seen on the ledge — a brown towhee, and a male and female house finch. As I left, I paused to read the information sheet in the display case near the door. It stated that all of the birds inside were from Santa Barbara County and there were nearly 400 of them.
I had 398 to go.
2
How Sweet the Honey
On the way home I stopped downtown and blew the rest of the month’s expense money on a pair of binoculars, a copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds, and a Handbook of California Birds by Brown and Weston. Thus equipped, I confidently expected to spend the balance of the day beside the window identifying all the birds that passed my way or stopped to eat.
My confidence was ill timed and misplaced. There were a lot of birds, certainly, but they were extremely uncooperative and so were the binoculars. When I was lucky enough to spot a bird quietly perched on a branch, I had to get the binoculars focused on it and adjusted to my eyes, then I had to go through all the illustrations in the Field Guide and the Handbook until I came to a picture that resembled what I’d seen. At this point I invariably discovered that my initial study of the bird hadn’t been thorough enough and that I needed another look at it. By the time the binoculars and I were prepared for another look, the bird was halfway to Los Angeles and I was left gnashing my teeth and suffering from dizziness and a severe headache. (These symptoms are all common among new bird watchers; only the gnashing is permanent.)
About the middle of the afternoon a brash blue-and-grey bird joined the house finches feeding on the ledge and stayed long enough for me to identify it as a scrub jay. This was my first identification on my own, and though it was a small thing it went to my head like the smell of a cork to an old toper. I began to envisage my ledge and its surrounding greenery as a place to which birds of all kinds would irresistibly be drawn. I knew nothing whatever about attracting birds, but I’d had quite a lot of experience in attracting people and perhaps the same method could be used — food and drink. Obviously parakeet seed wasn’t going to do the trick alone; I needed to put out several kinds of food.
I had a vague memory of watching my father, when I was a child in Canada, go through all sorts of shenanigans to keep the birds out of the cherry trees. Nothing had worked, so I reasoned that some birds must be inordinately fond of cherries. I didn’t have any cherries on hand but I found a bunch of grapes, which might possibly be mistaken for cherries by a bird who was a little nearsighted. I also found some bread and four stale doughnuts. The grapes I fastened with a pipe cleaner to a branch of the tea tree at one end of the ledge. The bread I crumbled and scattered with the rest of the parakeet seed. One doughnut I slipped over a twig of the lemon tree, another in the cotoneaster, and the remaining two in the tea tree with the grapes.
If the arrangements looked as peculiar to the birds as they did to me, they would undoubtedly stay away in droves. To avoid disappointment, I decided not to sit around and wait but to go back downtown and purchase a few more bird-luring devices. It was on this trip that I met Harry.
Harry was the proprietor of a pet shop. Wearing his starched white coat and his sedate yet sympathetic smile, he looked more like a doctor about to diagnose my symptoms and treat the underlying disease. I didn’t know it at the time but I was the kind of customer, or patient, Harry had been waiting for all his life. I had the disease for which he had the cure.
His first recommendation was a bird bath. Or rather, two bird baths. Some birds liked the ordinary pedestal-type bath, he said, while others preferred a container placed right on the ground. I didn’t want to be accused of discrimination so I bought a four-dollar clay saucer in addition to the ten-dollar pedestal bath. (“Hang the expense,” Harry said cheerfully.)
He also sold me a hopper-type seed dispenser and a hummingbird feeder which I was instructed to fill with a half-honey, half-water mixture boiled for ten minutes to kill the bacteria that would hasten fermentation. The bottle also had to be cleaned and the mixture renewed every second or third day to prevent the stuff turning into liquor and intoxicating the hummingbirds. Drunkenness, he hinted, was commoner among birds than most temperance-oriented bird lovers cared to admit.
Since that first talk with Harry I’ve seen a number of examples of intemperance — a flock of robins who’d gorged themselves on overripe pyracantha berries and were reeling around on a lawn like tumbleweed, and house finches tame as tulips after a feast of rotting peaches. Every winter I’ve watched a sapsucker imbibing fermented sap he’d tapped himself from a willow tree and trying to protect his source of supply from a thirsty and determined oriole. On a recent occasion I was nearly run down by a boozy bunch of waxwings who had arrived later than usual when the toyon berries were past their prime. But I have yet to see any drunken hummingbirds. Perhaps they are indistinguishable from sober ones.